A logistics challenge in the package delivery industry and in other industries that dispatch drivers to a variety of locations to perform work and/or otherwise service customers is the ability to present a driver with a complete picture of the work to be completed on a given day. Companies with fleets of vehicles spend vast amounts of time and money to develop dispatch plans and driver routes to allow a driver to efficiently cover as much territory in as little time as possible. Unfortunately, the dispatch plan and route that a driver typically uses to service a territory is based not on the actual work assigned to the driver, but on statistical analysis of the work that is typically assigned to a driver on an average day.
The driver's route, then, is not based on his or her work assignments, but on forecasts of what type of workload the driver will typically receive on a given day. This reliance on forecasts and statistical averaging of historical data has a number of shortcomings. One problem is that the driver rarely knows what work he or she has actually been assigned until just before the route begins. In most cases, the distribution of work between a group of drivers is an ongoing process that continues until just before the drivers leave a hub facility and begin servicing their routes. This time crunch at the start of the day often results in drivers beginning their routes with an incomplete picture of the work assigned to them.
In the package delivery context, drivers are only minimally involved as packages are loaded into delivery vehicles. Loading responsibility generally falls to a group known as pre-loaders who have the responsibility of receiving packages from sortation belts and bins and of loading the packages onto one of a line of delivery vehicles. Because of the number of packages and the time required to load a delivery vehicle, the pre-load process typically starts between 4:00 a.m. and 5:00 a.m. and is nearing completion by the time the driver arrives at the facility. Although some discussion may occur between the drivers and the pre-loaders, the pre-loaders deal with such a large number of packages that they cannot recall specifics about packages loaded onto a particular delivery vehicle.
As a result, if a driver wants to know what or how much work has been assigned to his route, he or she must physically examine and sort through the packages loaded in the storage area of the vehicle. And if a package is loaded in the wrong area or if the driver simply misses a package during this inventory process, a package may go unnoticed until well after the driver has passed the point in the route where the package should have been delivered. This forces the driver to break from the planned route to deliver the package that was missed resulting in inefficiencies in the delivery process.
Another complicating factor in delivery processes that are used today is the existence of premium service levels and delivery time guarantees. Almost every commercial package carrier now offers some form of premium service level that comes with a guarantee that a package will be delivered by a certain time of day or within a specified time window. These delivery time guarantees complicate the driver's job by requiring that during the inventory of his or her work assignments for the day, the driver must recognize the work assigned that was assigned to the route and the packages that have been guaranteed to be delivered by a certain time. Not surprisingly, drivers sometimes fail to identify a package as having a commit time until after the guaranteed time of delivery has passed. In other cases, drivers lose track of time and have to break from their planned route to satisfy a commit time.
A unsatisfied need therefore exists in the industry for improved systems and methods of providing drivers with work manifests.